CANCELLED Talk: The New Higher Education Settlement (Keele, 20 October)

I’m afraid I’ve had to postpone this talk owing to ill health. (12 October)

The New Higher Education Settlement: Does it Add Up?

This summer’s White Paper for Higher Education, Success as a Knowledge Economy represents a new settlement for English universities and colleges.  The White Paper heralds an intervention in settled notions of institutional autonomy and academic freedom as powers will be extended to establish a market for quality.  The three-pronged justification for this reorientation is degree inflation, student dissatisfaction, and employer complaints about graduate abilities.  Lurking in the background a further dimension has become clearer – the government as investor has not seen the expected return: an increase in graduate salaries.  At the same time, the expansion of undergraduate places over the last two decades has not been accompanied by the predicted increase in British productivity, despite successive governments’ faith in the generic value of a degree…